


The Boy Who Cried Wolf

by panjianlien



Category: Red Dwarf
Genre: Dom/sub, Humor, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-16
Updated: 2009-11-16
Packaged: 2017-10-03 02:04:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/panjianlien/pseuds/panjianlien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arnold Judas Rimmer was never precisely known for his bold and forthright approach, and half a light year is an awfully long way, but fortunately, Lister went to art college.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Boy Who Cried Wolf

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: These are not my characters and this is not my universe. 'Nuff said. Written for Sanj and Ellen_Fremedon.

"Wake up! Wake up! We've got to get out!"

"Smeg!" Lister sat up at precisely the wrong angle. He clutched his head where it had hit the hard plastic trim above the bunk, and winced as he stared at the hyperkinetic hologram running around the room at top velocity. "Stop flapping around like a bleeding hummingbird with his tongue plugged into the mains and just tell me what the hell's going on, will ya, Rimmer?"

Rimmer continued shouting, arms waving madly toward the door. "Got to get out! Got to get out! Emergency! Starbug! Hurry! Get out!"

"I'm getting, I'm getting. Don't need to make a macrame of your Y-fronts." Skeptically, Lister looked at the screen as he grabbed for his clothes. Nothing from Holly. He did up his pants and buckled his belt. But if it were a real emergency, maybe Holly'd been taken offline. Ah, shit. Maybe it was serious.

As rapidly as possible he put on a shirt, trying to ignore the screaming, and jammed his feet into his boots. "All right, already," he said, striding purposefully into the corridor.

The screaming didn't follow him. Arg, smeg, Lister thought. He turned around and went back into their quarters and took Rimmer by the elbow, turning him toward the door. "All right! Let's go then, Mister Rouge Alert."

They pelted down the hallways and up the stairwells, running hell for leather toward the shuttle bay. As they reached the shuttle's side, Lister glanced behind him.

"Where's Kryten and the Cat?"

"I woke them first. They should already be on board," Rimmer said, climbing the steps at full speed. "And if they aren't, we can't afford to go look for them now. The ship's about to blow, Lister! Get up here!" With one last glance back, and praying that the others were where Rimmer said they should be, Lister followed.

Panting, Lister and Rimmer slammed themselves into the badly-upholstered chairs on Starbug's flight deck. Lister slapped the controls into action and pulled hard on the stick as the shuttle bay doors irised open, and, running on a lean mix of adrenaline and fear, shot Starbug out into the lonely emptiness of space.

They hurtled through the vast blackness, their jets blazing behind them, but Lister's eyes never left the viewscreens on the pilot's dashboard. His left hand hovered over the big red button of the Holly Hop Drive. They'd installed it in Starbug as a security measure. The big ship was so old and so worn that there was a very real risk that the engines could go, no matter how careful he and Rimmer, or, to be honest, Kryten and Holly, which was to say mostly Kryten, were with the maintenance. In the event that the ship's engines hit critical, they needed to be as far away as quickly as possible. And that meant the Hop Drive. In about three more seconds they'd be far enough away from Red Dwarf to activate the point-five lightyear leap that had been programmed into the Hop Drive. Eyes wide with adrenaline and fixed on the chronometer and navicomp, Lister counted down, taking a slow, deep breath. _Two... one... and **go.**_

The universe winked. Lister slumped in the pilot's chair, a long loud sigh. Hands trembling with relief, he stared out the front viewscreen at the blackness. Rimmer sat nervously next to him, safety straps ratcheted down tight across his body in a broad X of nylon webbing. Not for the first time, Lister was exquisitely aware that Rimmer wasn't breathing. Holograms didn't need to, and while Rimmer prided himself on remembering to do it, it was a part of his daily self-improvement regime, after all, death didn't have to be such a handicap any more, not like in the old days, you just had to have the right attitude, he sometimes forgot when he was frightened.

"Hey, we made it," Lister said, turning and patting the hard-light shoulder of his dearly departed bunkmate. "Breathe. We're safe."

Rimmer swallowed hard and stared straight ahead. "Good. Yes. We are. Safe." He fumbled with the clasp on his safety harness. Somehow he couldn't seem to remember how to breathe. Not with the lingering sensation of Lister's fingers on his arm. "Well done then, Lister. I'll just, er, go and check on the Cat and Kryten, then, shall I? And you can figure out where we are."

"Bugger. Yeah, guess I'd better..." Lister turned back to the navicomp. He never had quite gotten used to Rimmer's hot-and-cold. One minute he'd be shrieking like a schoolgirl with a tarantula down her jumper, the next minute, cold as plaice on ice. The best he could do was try not to let it get to him. Lister prodded the keypad and hoped against hope that the Holly Hop might've gotten them a tad bit closer to Earth. It'd take some figuring to find out.

 

§

 

"Christ," Lister said to no one in particular as he kneaded his temples, "what I wouldn't give for a lager right now." He'd been at it for the better part of an hour, though most of it had been devoted to figuring out that he'd got the star chart display on upside-down. Fixing it didn't make things any easier, but Kryten would probably be able to make sense out of it.

Where was Kryten, anyway? Where were either of them? The Cat hadn't even come in to piss and moan about the decimated state of his wardrobe, or insist that they go back to see if any silk pocket squares or perhaps his favorite black and white fur smoking jacket had somehow escaped the blast. Hell, Rimmer hadn't even come back to catch him looking at the star chart upside down and be a total smeghead about it. That wasn't like him. An icy laser-beam of paranoia shot up Lister's spine and lifted him out of his seat, running almost before he was standing, his bellowed "RIMMAH!" making several delicate cockpit instruments completely lose their calibration.

§

"Ah, bugger." Lister stopped short in the center of the cargo bay. There was nowhere else any of them could be, and they weren't there either. "Sometimes I smegging hate being right."

The topmost curls of Rimmer's hair were just barely visible behind a large stack of plastic module-crates. Wedged between the heavy crates of supplies and the bulkhead, Rimmer cringed, eyes shut tight.

With elaborate patience, Lister pulled up an errant crate and sat on it. "Rimmer, come out of there."

"I can't."

"Are you stuck?"

"No."

"Then come out."

"I can't come out." Rimmer's dejection was audible.

"Why can't you come out, Rimmer?" Lister asked, exploring the pocket of his jacket in hopes of a fag-end lurking in its darker recesses. He found one, stuck it in his ear for safe-keeping, and began patting his pockets for his Zippo. "Stepped in the hyperglue trap you put down to catch the Silurian space mice, did you? Foot stuck to the floor now, is that it?"

"No, only _you_ would be that stupid," he snipped. Rimmer had, in fact, stepped smack into the hyperglue as he wriggled into the tiny space behind the cargo pods, but had managed, by dint of careful stretching, to get his boot untied and release his foot. His toes should've been sweating from the nerves, he thought as he wiggled them in their holographic sock, and the knowledge that they weren't added just a bit more depth to his butt-clenching, tooth-grinding, forehead-furrowing, utterly involuntary and completely embarrassing anxiety. "I just... I just can't. That's all. I can't come out until you leave the room."

"Rimmer, don't be stupid. I've been your bunkmate for three million years, man. I've had to sleep through your farts. I've endured your four a.m. astronavigation revisions and your smegging Learn Esperanto tapes so often I should just rent meself out as a freelance translating dictionary for interstellar cruises. I've watched you sewing your little embroidered name tapes into your drawers, man. And I say you're comin' out right this second and you're tellin' me what the ripe hell is goin' on. 'Cause Kryten and the Cat aren't on Starbug, Rimmer. And I have a feeling Red Dwarf didn't blow. And you owe me one hell of a smegging explanation."

The silence was deafening. Lister took the fag-end from his ear and placed it between his lips. "I got all day, ya know," he mumbled around it as he flicked his Zippo into flame. He took a deep drag on the cigarette, trying not to wonder whether it was the only one aboard, and exhaled it out his nose. With the next puff, he got up, walked across to the stack of crates, and blew the smoke through the gap between crates directly at where Rimmer's head should be.

Rimmer coughed. "What'd you have to go do that for? You know I can't abide cigarette smoke!"

"Yah, I know," Lister drawled, leaning genially against the crates. "But at least it makes for conversation, dunnit? I was gettin' a little bored out here all alone in outer space, thought you might like to join me."

"You have to promise me something first."

"For Christ's sake, Rimmer, what have I got to promise you? A fruitcake at Christmas? That I'll brush me teeth three times a day? That I'll burn me guitar? That I'll never mention gazpacho soup again?"

Redfaced with fury, Rimmer launched himself at Lister, shaking a finger at him. " You PROMISED! You already promised you'd never mention gazpacho soup again and you just did!"

Lister smiled smugly and shifted his weight from one foot to the other, poking the air with the last glowing tidbit of cigarette. "Yeah. But it got you out from behind those crates, didn't it?"

Rimmer stalked across the room and pretended to be tremendously interested in an instrument on the wall. "Did not. I was getting claustrophobic." Lister murmured something noncommittal as he watched Rimmer try to ignore him. "Anyhow, you still have to promise me something."

"All right, Rimmer. We're half a light year away from the ship, we don't know in what direction, we haven't been able to re-establish contact with Holly, and I've just discovered that you did this for no apparent reason. And I've got to promise you something? What?"

"You have to promise that you won't hate me." Second Technician Rimmer looked earnestly at his bunkmate with big dark puppy-dog eyes.

"Well, I couldn't possibly hate you any more. I can promise you that. Now will you tell me just what the smegging bloody hell on a biscuit you did this for?"

Rimmer fidgeted, staring at his fingernails. "I thought, er, well, that is to say, I thought it would be a nice thing if we, that is, you and I, Rimmsy and Listy, you know, the two of us, had a chance to talk."

Lister exploded. They'd been cooped up on a ship together for how long, and now this gimboid idiot decided he needed to cry wolf and strand them both in deep space so they could talk? "Rimmer, we talk every single damned day. Your mouth moves. Words come out. I ignore them, because they're stupid. But I know they're there. Later, I tell you things you need to know, and you act like a smeghead regardless. We talk all the time. I don't see the point."

Rimmer slumped. He should've known better. He wasn't going to be any better at this with Lister than he'd been with women. Not that it would matter. Lister wouldn't have anything to do with it. Or with him. Lister was too much of a man for that. More than him. Clearly he never had the kind of thoughts that required replacing the contents of the salt cellar with saltpeter, or sent him running to the showers for a nice long relaxing cold one. Not about men, anyway. Even if he had ever thought that way about a man, surely it'd be someone entirely unlike himself. Not dead, for one thing. And not a failure, not a big purulent boil on the bottom of progress. Not someone who'd failed the astronavigation exam thirteen times in a row. Lister'd go for someone who had proper parents, who'd gone into the Space Corps a buck private and had flown right up the ranks like a monkey zipping up a banana tree, all pluck and derring-do. Lister'd had bit of a gleam in his eye the last time Ace Rimmer had been on board, come to think of it. Arnold could remember that all too well. If that was what it would take to turn Lister's head even platonically, well, he just wasn't it.

But on the other hand, he'd gone this far. He knew he wasn't going to get what he wanted, but damn it, at least he could be a man for once in his life and say what he'd come all that way to say. Maybe. Rimmer bit his lip. Come on, man, just say it. This isn't the psi-moon. It doesn't have to be like that. Just once in your life you can at least try not to be disappointing.

He took a deep breath. "Look, I realize you're probably not even going to listen and I probably shouldn't even try to explain, but, well, do you remember when Kryten found that pleasure GELF and brought her on board?"

Lister looked surprised. "Camille? Yeah, what about her?"

"Well, do you remember how when Kryten saw her she looked like his ultimate dream of a female android? And how when you saw her she looked like Kochanski, but kind of punk, I think you said?"

"Yeah, I remember." Lister's voice held an edge. "What's that got to do with this?"

"And do you remember when you and Kryten built the triplicator and we had to go onto the evil ship and deal with our evil selves?"

Lister grinned wryly. "I was a total bad-arse, yeah, I remember that."

"Do you remember what the evil version of me was like?"

Lister winced slightly at the memory of the holo-whip, to say nothing of the evil Rimmer's atrocious taste in lingerie. It had been a mad, bad, dangerous day, one that had disturbed him long after the fact. Sometimes, just as he was about to bring himself off in one of his furtive bouts of self-abuse in the shower, he could still hear the evil Rimmer saying " I'm going to lash you to within an inch of your life. And then I'm going to have you." The memory of that voice, saying those words, did things to him. Things he wasn't so comfortable with, necessarily. But a bloke had to make do, since there was no way Smeghead was going to let him have Kochanski even temporarily. And, well, it worked.

Rimmer looked down at his shoes. "Well, you know how I told you that the GELF looked like my sister-in-law Janine to me?"

Lister nodded. "Yeah, you said she was a second technician just like you."

"I lied."

"You lied? Why the hell would you lie about something like that?"

"Because she wasn't a second technician."

Lister covered his face with his hands and spoke very slowly and very carefully. "So help me, Rimmer, if you pulled this stunt just to tell me that I will rip your light bee out with my bare hands and eject it out the airlock."

"I... no, no, there's more to it, Lister. Just hear me out. Please." The seriousness in Rimmer's voice took Lister by surprise, and he looked up.

"Ten seconds, Rimmer. I'll give you ten seconds. That's it."

"She wasn't a second technician..."

"Nine," Lister intoned, looking at his wristwatch.

"And she didn't look like my sister-in-law Janine..."

"Eight," Lister said matter-of-factly, eyes still on his watch.

"In fact she wasn't a she at all and she looked an awful lot..."

"Seven."

"...like you, and I know you don't want to hear it, because I'm not the kind of guy you'd give the time of day to anyhow but..."

"What?"

"...that's what I saw and anyhow then when I saw the evil Rimmer and I realized that there was something I'd been repressing for a very long time, you know, really since my parents sent me off to school and Thicky Holden and I used to, well you know how schoolboys are, but I guess it made an impression on me and I've just never quite shaken it and I know you haven't got the slightest bit of sympathy for me and you certainly don't return the interest but I've been thinking about it for an awfully long time now and I just couldn't stand it any more, day in and day out, sharing the ship with you without being able to tell you..."

Carefully, slowly, hardly daring to move, Rimmer looked up, his eyes sliding slowly up Lister's body, though only as far as his chest. He couldn't quite force himself to look at the other man's face. Lister stepped forward and crooked a finger under his chin, tipping his head up the rest of the way, and winked. "Tell me what?"

Rimmer stammered and stuttered and blushed such a fierce crimson that his ears almost produced a red shift. "I, uh, I... oh, nothing. Nothing. You wouldn't want to know. It's nothing."

Then Lister's hand was on his crotch. "Doesn't feel like nothing to me, mate. That's some hard light right there, if I'm not very badly mistaken." Rimmer's gasp was so loud he embarrassed himself. Lister's face moved closer, and closer yet. There was a faint hint of vindaloo in the air, mingled with the smell of sweat and cigarettes, and Lister's eyes narrowed as his hand pressed harder against the swelling lump in his shipmate's trousers. "So what was that about my not wanting to know?"

"I... I guess I never thought..."

"Aw, come on, Rimmer," Lister said, backing him up until his back was against the doorframe that led to the cockpit. "You know full well I went to art college."

Rimmer didn't know what to do with himself, and had no idea what to do with his hands. Tentatively, clumsily, he stroked the other man's shoulder, lightly running his fingers down his bicep, pulse hammering so hard he feared his aorta might burst. His voice was soft, and he clung to the shreds of sentence structure for dear life. "For ninety-seven minutes. I'd hardly have thought..."

"I was a quick study." Lister wedged the hologram's legs open with his thigh and pressed his hip against his crotch with a lewd smile. "So tell me what I wouldn't want to know, Arnold J."

"I think you have the sexiest lips I've ever seen. On a man," he breathed.

"Yeah, they're not bad, eh? So you gonna tell me where you've been thinking about feeling them?" Lister's eternal cockiness was halfway annoying even while it was wholly arousing.

Experimentally, Rimmer reached around Lister's torso and stroked the tips of his soft, wooly dreadlocks. "I want you to take my trousers down, Third Technician Lister," he said with great deliberation, "and I want to watch you wrap those lips of yours around my cock."

Lister's eyebrows went up and he let his face assume an exaggerated pose of shock. "Why, Second Technician Rimmer, I'm surprised at you."

"I promise you I'll still respect you in the morning," Rimmer stuttered, his nerves reasserting themselves, to his intense annoyance, in the face of imminent success.

"Rimmer, you don't respect me _now_."

Rimmer wrapped Lister's dreadlocks once around his hand and tugged slowly, firmly, urgently. "Shut up and start sucking, Lister, or I'm putting you on report."

With a gigantic grin, Lister let himself be dropped to his knees. "Certainly, Sir," he replied, looking up Rimmer's starched shirtfront to his incredulous face. "I thought you'd never ask."


End file.
